His speeches are outbursts of incredible arrogance, equally powerful and bombastic.

Fletcher, Robert Huntington -- A History of English Literature

We all expect and even enjoy a certain amount of bombast from our politicians, but it is not a good thing that public policy and private practice should diverge as much as they do in the United States today.

they do not know how to speak to men, with false maxims, with bombastic commonplaces!

Voltaire -- Candide

...nobody ever knew ... if he did not perhaps learn it too from the same book out of which he taught himself the words, the bombastic phrases...

William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!

How now, my sweet creature of bombast?

William Shakespeare -- Henry IV, Part 1

We have receiv’d your letters, full of love;Your favours, the ambassadors of love;And, in our maiden council, rated themAt courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy,As bombast and as lining to the time;

William Shakespeare -- Love’s Labour’s Lost

The boys know it, too, they’ve learned this well, and they’ll all wave goodbye with it, stridently, strong-armed, father-son, with the bombast of Americans, not yet knowing that this is the last language they will share.

The letter was full of the usual bombast and fustian I reserved for my periods of anger, but I wanted to appear before the board of education very much.

Pat Conroy -- The Water is Wide

Such remarks are rescued from bombast by knowledge that all four men who wrote them—two lieutenants, a sergeant, and a private—were killed in action.

James M. McPherson -- What They Fought For - 1861-1865

It’s a hint of the old bombast, the old peacock tail, and reassuring.

Margaret Atwood -- Cat’s Eye

He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly.

Stephen Crane -- The Red Badge of Courage

Sometimes, he was a very comfortable person to live with, for all his unfortunate habit of not permitting anyone in his presence to act a lie, palm off a pretense or indulge in bombast.

Margaret Mitchell -- Gone with the Wind

The bombastic trickle continued for over three minutes.

Christopher Paolini -- Brisingr

"We mothers—" simpered Mrs. Honeychurch, and then realized that she was affected, sentimental, bombastic—all the things she hated most.

E.M. Forster -- A Room With A View

Pouring out his taunting sarcasm in short, bombastic thunderbolts of gigantic rage, hate and ridicule, day after day, in town after town, he assailed his opponents and their policies with bitter invective.

John F. Kennedy -- Profiles in Courage

And on its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels -- The Communist Manifesto

While he was most bombastically agreeing with the coat-man that the weather was warm, he was conscious that he was longing to run childishly with his troubles to the comfort of the fairy child.

Sinclair Lewis -- Babbitt

Thus the heroe is always introduced with a flourish of drums and trumpets, in order to rouse a martial spirit in the audience, and to accommodate their ears to bombast and fustian, which Mr Locke’s blind man would not have grossly erred in likening to the sound of a trumpet.

Henry Fielding -- Tom Jones

Perfectly bombastic and ridiculous, he said.

Joseph Conrad -- Lord Jim

His wild bombast was tempered now by senile petulance.

Thomas Wolfe -- Look Homeward, Angel

Stay out of the light, the gaudy bombastic lights that belonged more properly to an island carnivale.

Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Ultimatum

No bombast.

John Gardner -- The Sunlight Dialogues

Athelny, with his powerful voice in the diminutive body, with his bombast, with his foreign look, with his emphasis, was an astonishing creature.

W. Somerset Maugham -- Of Human Bondage

By a meticulous and merciless splitting of hairs, a gigantic manufacture of classifications and sub-classifications, a colossal display of professorial bombast and flatulence.

Henry L. Mencken -- The American Language

Even during his early days in politics, when his speeches were full of conventional platform bombast, Lincoln seldom failed to strike the humble manner that was peculiarly his.

Richard Hofstadter -- Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth

There were insults exchanged that would long fester, bombast and hyperbole in abundance, and moments when eloquence was brought to bear with a dramatic effect remarkable even in the Commons.

David G. McCullough -- 1776

Things might be different awake; maybe in looking for inner support he would do well to give Settembrini’s novel nature a try—rebellious and critical, though sentimental and bombastic, too.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

In the poems with long lines, his ambition did not extend beyond the town of Arzamas; he wanted to keep up with the grownups, impress his uncle with mythologism, bombast, faked epicureanism and sophistication, and affected a precocious worldly wisdom.

Boris Pasternak -- Doctor Zhivago

Tolstoy then makes a sort of exposition of the plot of KING LEAR, finding it at every step to be stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, "wild ravings", "mirthless jokes", anachronisms, irrelevancies, obscenities, worn-out stage conventions and other faults both moral and aesthetic.

George Orwell -- Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool

To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

Frederick Douglass -- The Hypocrisy of American Slavery

—Bombast! the professor broke in testily.

James Joyce -- Ulysses

There stood "1650" in ornate numbers, and framing the date were all sorts of curlicued engraved lines, done in the "modern fashion" of the period, bombastic and capricious arabesques and crests that were half stars, half flowers.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

What constituted man’s true state and condition: obliteration in all-devouring, all-leveling community, which was a simultaneously voluptuous and ascetic act; or "critical subjectivity," where bombast and strict bourgeois virtue were at loggerheads?

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

Sophia, confused as she was, answered this bombast (and very properly I think) with a look of inconceivable disdain.

Henry Fielding -- Tom Jones

No bombast, no rodomontade, here.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

I think the idea first originated in your mind as the result of a chance encounter in a city coffee den with this odd personality with his bombastic Christian names.

His bombastic Christian names, his account of his epileptic seizures and of his headaches, his whole shrinking and insignificant personality, struck you as fitting him for the tool you wanted.

Agatha Christie -- The ABC Murders

[15] The American newspapers, years ago, passed through such a stage of bombast, but since the invention of yellow journalism by the elder James Gordon Bennett—that is, the invention of journalism for the frankly ignorant and vulgar—they have gone to the other extreme.

Henry L. Mencken -- The American Language

Something ate with us; we talked to it and it answered questions; it sat with us before the fire at night and, rousing without any warning from some profound and bemused complete inertia, talked, not to us, the six ears, the three minds capable of listening, but to the air, the waiting grim decaying presence, spirit, of the house itself; talking that which sounded like the bombast of a madman who creates within his very coffin walls his fabulous immeasurable Camelot: and Carcassonne.

William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!

…some indomitable desperation of undefeat watching that dark interdict ocean across which a grim lightless solitary ship fled with in its hold two thousand precious pounds-space containing not bullets, not even something to eat, but that much bombastic and inert carven rock which for the next year was to be a part of the regiment, to follow it into Pennsylvania and be present at Gettysburg, moving behind the regiment in a wagon driven by the demon’s body servant through swamp and plain…

William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!

And we are reluctant shades by the roadside, ashamed of our own shadowy security and not in the least inclined to indulge in bombast and rodomontade; but, rather, the spirit of our story has led us here to watch these gray, running, stumbling troops as they swarm now from the woods, urged on by drums, and to gaze into the ordinary face of our companion of so many little years, that kindhearted sinner whose voice we have heard so often, to see him once more before he passes out of view.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

§ 2 /The Language in the Making/—All this jingoistic bombast, however, was directed toward defending, not so much the national vernacular as the national beautiful letters.

Henry L. Mencken -- The American Language

Why the cock’s comb actually swells—or whatever other bombastic examples one might mention—remains a mystery, so to speak, particularly since psychological influences are involved.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

He walked among the gay crowd of afternoon with a sense of elation, answering the hearty greetings with joy, warming to its thoughtless bombast.